September 21st, 2017

What is a database? Once upon a time, it was simple. The database was a modern Bob Cratchit putting data in tables made up of very straight columns filled with one row per entry. Long, endless rectangles of information stretching on into the future.

The relational database has been the bedrock of modern computing. The vast majority of websites are just a bunch of CSS lipstick painted on top of SQL. Everything that makes us special is just another row … Read the rest

September 15th, 2017

Self-driving cars, face detection software, and voice controlled speakers all are built on machine learning technologies and frameworks–and these are just the first wave. Over the next decade, a new generation of products will transform our world, initiating new approaches to software development and the applications and products that we create and use.

As a Java developer, you want to get ahead of this curve now–when tech companies are beginning to seriously invest in machine learning. What you learn … Read the rest

September 15th, 2017

Kotlin is a general purpose, open source, statically typed “pragmatic” programming language for the JVM and Android that combines object-oriented and functional programming features. It is focused on interoperability, safety, clarity, and tooling support. Versions of Kotlin for JavaScript (ECMAScript 5.1) and native code (using LLVM) are in the works.

Kotlin originated at JetBrains, the company behind IntelliJ IDEA, in 2010, and has been open source since 2012. The Kotlin team currently has more than 20 full-time members from JetBrains, … Read the rest

September 13th, 2017

Most any application needs some form of persistence—a way to store the data outside of the application for safekeeping. The most basic way is to write data to the file system, but that can quickly become a slow and unwieldy way to solve the problem. A full-blown database provides a powerful way to index and retrieve data, but may also be overkill. Sometimes all you need is a quick way to take a freeform piece of information, associate it with … Read the rest

August 31st, 2017

Blue Ocean, the new user interface for the popular Jenkins continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, will begin incorporating insights into code quality trends and static analyses, under an improvement plan detailed this week by the project’s creator.

The goal is to improve the developer’s visibility into the health of software projects, Blue Ocean creator James Dumay, director of project management at Jenkins technology vendor CloudBees, said. Plans also call for expanding the capabilities of Blue Ocean’s visual … Read the rest

August 28th, 2017

Today, Structured Query Language is the standard means of manipulating and querying data in relational databases, though with proprietary extensions among the products. The ease and ubiquity of SQL have even led the creators of many “NoSQL” or non-relational data stores, such as Hadoop, to adopt subsets of SQL or come up with their own SQL-like query languages.

But SQL wasn’t always the “universal” language for relational databases. From the beginning (circa 1980), SQL had certain strikes … Read the rest

August 17th, 2017

H2O, now in its third major revision, provides access to machine learning algorithms by way of common development environments (Python, Java, Scala, R), big data systems (Hadoop, Spark), and data sources (HDFS, S3, SQL, NoSQL). H2O is meant to be used as an end-to-end solution for gathering data, building models, and serving predictions. For instance, models can be exported as Java code, allowing predictions to be served on many platforms and in many environments.

Visual Studio takes a 22.4 percent share in this month’s index. Eclipse follows with a 20.38 percent share. Much further back was Android Studio, with a 9.87 percent share. “It’s surprising how a couple of IDEs have about half the popularity,” PYPL’s Pierre Carbonelle said.